Bob Woodward Says Obama Is 'In Over His Head'

Bob Woodward has been telling on presidents since he and Carl
Bernstein teamed up to reveal the Watergate misdeeds of
President Richard Nixon in the mid-1970s, and he's at it again.

This time, it's President Barack Obama who is feeling the
sting, not because of criminal acts, but because of ineptness,
arrogance and other attributes that in combination spell peril
for America.

The Washington Post associate editor may
not put it quite that way in his new book, "The Price of
Politics."

But when you've finished reading a published excerpt and
summaries, you can either indulge in liberal sympathy, saying
the poor president has had the misfortune of having to deal
with human beings more ordinary than he is, or you can face the
truth: He's in over his head.

It's discouraging stuff. Obama miscalculated, and badly, in
negotiations with House Speaker John Boehner on getting Republicans to allow
more borrowing and avert default by convincing them something
significant would be done about a wildly growing, ruinous debt.
Despite Republican travails about stiff tax hikes to help fix
the mess, Boehner was willing to go along with an $800 billion
revenue increase achieved through reform. The grand compromise
was about done when Obama asked for another $400 billion. That
was it. Finis. End of the game.

How bad a negotiator do you have to be to not get it that when
you have a bird in hand you forget the two in the bush? After
the fact, Obama said the $400 billion was just a suggestion and
fumed that Boehner stayed away from the phone for a day before
he unleashed his fury on the speaker. Angrily blaming others
for your own mistakes strikes me as the kind of pomposity that
makes things worse.

The president was outraged again when Democratic and Republican
leaders in Congress, seeing the White House as a roadblock,
swerved around it to negotiate their own deal. Dismissing the
effort and later threatening a veto, Obama earned himself a
rebuke from an aide to Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid. This man, David Krone, found it a major lapse that the
White House had no fallback plan when its initial bartering
went astray.

Among others casting doubt on Obama as negotiator were Lawrence
Summers, the former Harvard president and presidential
financial adviser who said Obama just did not like the game,
and Rep. Chris Van Hollen, top Democrat on the House Budget
Committee, who accused the White House of having no strategy or
"core principles." There's hearsay in the book that Vice
President Joseph Biden, who himself seemed pretty able at
reaching understandings with recalcitrant Republicans, said he
would approach the negotiating "totally different" if it were
up to him.

All of this matters, and it matters powerfully. We are facing a
major fiscal crisis at the turn of the year if Congress does
not act to keep Bush-era tax cuts in place while stopping
immediate and drastic budget cuts. The latest unemployment
figures show that even more frustrated people are dropping out
of the job market. Middle-class incomes have fallen by
thousands of dollars. And, among a host of other scary issues,
we face a debt sure to deliver calamity in the absence of
significant long-term cuts.

None of what is needed is likely to be achieved without a
national leader who actually leads, which entails effective
negotiating. We need to look elsewhere than Obama, and no, I do
not mean we therefore hope he puts Biden in charge.